This Week In Techdirt History: June 11th - 17th

from the a-saga-begins dept

Five Years Ago

It was this week in 2012 that The Oatmeal wrote a level-headed criticism of FunnyJunk and received, in return, a somewhat scattershot threat of a defamation lawsuit. As a result, a whole lot of internet attention and ire was turned on one man, whose name we'd become very familiar with: Charles Carreon, who dug in his heels and tried to shut down The Oatmeal's fundraiser. Then he lashed out and accused Matt Inman of "instigating security attacks", and then swore he'd find some legal avenue by which to go after Inman. The saga, as you know, will continue in future weeks...

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, media companies continued to pile on to YouTube with money-grab lawsuits. Sports leagues were actively fighting to claim ownership of facts about games, with the NCAA ejecting a reporter for live-blogging and Major League Baseball taking its legal fight over fantasy leagues to the appeals court. The MPAA and RIAA teamed up to create yet another lobbying group hot on the heels of the new Copyright Alliance, AT&T decided to start filtering infringing content for Hollywood, and a worrying court ruling ordered TorrentSpy to collect and hand over additional data on its users.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, in an act that practically defined "too little, too late", Sony and Universal announced plans to cut prices on digital music downloads. The BSA was beating its usual drum about the dangers of software piracy, the government was floundering when it came to internal use of technology, and the geeks in Silicon Valley were continuing to get more political. It was also this week that the late, great David Bowie shared some of his refreshingly forward-looking thoughts on copyright in the digital age, saying "I'm fully confident that copyright, for instance, will no longer exist in 10 years, and authorship and intellectual property is in for such a bashing." Almost everything he said about the nature of the coming change was correct, but he underestimated the power, tenacity and deep pockets of those who continue to fight tooth and nail against it.

Ninety-Seven Years Ago

Most cliches exist for a reason — though tired, they are apt. It's easy to forget they had to come from somewhere, and fun to find out where that was. And so this week we celebrate the birth of a common political cliche: the "smoke-filled room" where big decisions are made by powerful people. It was on June 11th, 1920 that Raymond Clapper of the United Press first used the term to describe the nomination process for Warren G. Harding at the Republican National Convention, presumably not knowing it would enter the lexicon as a go-to shorthand.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: June 4th - 10th

from the recollections dept

Five Years Ago

Early this week in 2012, as the world continued to get its head around the recently-leaked details of the Stuxnet worm, we wondered why the usually-leak-averse White House didn't seem to be hassling anyone over these huge revelations, leading us to ask whether Chelsea (then Bradley) Manning would face the same charges if he had shared info with the New York Times instead of Wikileaks. Of course, by the end of the week, the winds seemed to be turning a little bit, with reports of an FBI investigation and calls for a hearing from Sen. Feinstein.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, Google was struggling to make publishers realize that its book search could be their friend by helping them make co-branded versions of the search for their own websites. Publishers, meanwhile, were pulling absurd stunts like stealing Google laptops at trade shows in order to air their misguided displeasure. Up here in Canada, following extensive and bizarre shaming from the industry over an apparent movie camcording problem, politicians introduced a new anti-camdording bill. And as the world awaited the approaching and much-hyped release of the iPhone, a number of other devices started getting labelled (both correctly and incorrectly) as competitors.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, the Church of Scientology was locked in a battle with Google over search results, the BSA teamed up with Egypt to issue a Fatwa on piracy, and Microsoft told Hollywood to get over itself and put content online. The buzz around newfangled "blogs" reached a fever pitch (and this is, I think, the first week where we started solely referring to them as blogs and never mentioning "weblogs") so of course one big question was: can you make money with them? Another big question was whether or not they count as "journalism", and apparently Berkeley's opinion was yes.

Sixty-Eight Years Ago

Comparisons to George Orwell's Ninteen Eighty-Four are not exactly uncommon in today's political and social climate, and while I personally remember finding its senior counterpart Brave New World to be the more resonant and insightful dystopia (it's been a while since I've read either), it seems worth noting that it was on June 8th, 1949 that Orwell's masterpiece was first published.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 28th - June 3rd

from the happy-birthday-to-you,-copyright-(I-can-sing-that-now,-right?) dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, Google's recently-unveiled tool for looking at DMCA takedown requests was revealing just how unbelievably stupid and bogus those requests so frequently are — but the RIAA was doing its best to blame its own failure to use the tools properly on Google, of course. Meanwhile, the government hit some speedbumps in its pursuit of Kim Dotcom when the New Zealand judge refused to rubber-stamp the extradition order, and the filings with the district court in the US revealed massive flaws in the government's case. Also, it was this week in 2012 that the New York Times revealed the extensive and fascinating details of the Stuxnet worm, confirming that it was a US-led project in conjunction with Israel.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the world was still trying to get its head around YouTube and the explosion of user-generated content. For some that meant pointing out how some of it sucks as if that means anything. For others (like governments around the world) that sometimes meant banning YouTube all together, or just trying to cleverly restrict user-generated content via "free trade" agreements. In Venezuela, however, YouTube became the new refuge for a traditional TV station that was shut down by the government.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, in the much earlier days of the DMCA, the EFF released a report detailing all the negative fallout of the anti-circumvention provisions for free speech, fair use, and innovation. Governments were struggling to figure out how national laws work on a borderless web, and Silicon Valley was realizing the necessity of dipping its toe into the Washington lobbying game. Meanwhile, Blockbuster was scrambling to go head-to-head with Netflix (and I think we all know how that worked out), online banking seemed to be finally taking off in the US (though that may have just been anecdotal), and the music industry was still not listening to the many people telling it what a big mistake it was making by shutting down Napster.

Two-Hundred And Twenty-Seven Years Ago

We recently noted the 1710 passage of the Statute of Anne, the original prototype copyright law — and this week we mark the formal beginning of the copyright saga in the US. It was on May 31st, 1790 that George Washington signed the Copyright Act into law. At the time, the Act was only half a page long, and applied only to books, maps, and charts — though musical compositions were routinely registered as books.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 21st - 27th

from the how-many-roads dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, the jury in the Oracle/Google patent trial ruled that there was no infringement, while Judge Alsup revealed his coding knowledge on the copyright side. MPAA boss Chris Dodd was saying they should stop calling infringement "theft" despite the MPAA's own website doing exactly that many times, Congress proposed giving ICE another ten million dollars to fight intellectual property infringement, and TV networks were suing DISH with the insane argument that skipping commercials is copyright infringement. Meanwhile, five years before its recent successful reusable rocket tests, SpaceX was making its first successful cargo run to the ISS, marking a significant milestone in private space travel.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the proprietary video services launched by various companies were continuing to struggle and die off, with CNN dropping its paid online video service while Time Warner struggled with its own, and Budweiser got ready to kill the ill-fated Bud.TV. The RIAA was trying to close the "radio loophole" by convincing Congress to force radio stations to pay royalties for playing music (leading some to notice that the industry was similarly worried about the "jukebox loophole" nearly half a century earlier), even while it was carefully backing down on new webcasting royalty rates that would have killed smaller webcasters.

Fifteen Years Ago

The webcasting battle was not new — five years earlier this week in 2007, an equally disastrous attempt to enact webcasting royalties fell through. Meanwhile, a virus that aimed to stop the trading of infringing material was spreading on the Kazaa network, Hollywood was trying to get copy protection built into all analog-to-digital converters, and you could cut the tension between Silicon Valley and Hollywood with a knife. Google launched its now-defunct Labs page, authoritarian regimes were wielding the power of the internet in frightening new ways, and the still-DVD-based Netflix went public, joining the ranks of stocks-you-really-wish-you'd-bought.

One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years Ago

They've done good reporting and bad, they've struggled to adapt to the digital world, and we've often criticized them here on Techdirt — but nevertheless the Associated Press is an old and proud fixture of the journalistic world, and it was on May 22nd, 1846 that it was founded by five New York City dailies to share the cost of covering the Mexican-American War.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 14th - 20th

from the the-more-things-change dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, a Microsoft-funded effort to disrupt BitTorrent was drawing scrutiny, EMI was gloating over the demise of MP3Tunes, and the MPAA was cheering on legal rulings against the Pirate Bay. Of course, one of those rulings was called into question when a Dutch judge's connections to anti-piracy groups drew accusations of corruption, and one of TPB's founders was taking the legal fight over a Swedish ruling to the EU courts. Meanwhile, protestors against the TPP were getting creative, Chile was threatening to drop out of the negotiations all together, Rep. Darrell Issa posted an old leaked version of the agreement for discussion, and the USTR was still attempting to claim that listening to people counts as "transparency".

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, while the MPAA was making some curious changes to its opaque and esoteric ratings system, the RIAA was getting journalists to parrot its propaganda about its copyright shakedowns, and Microsoft was spreading unoriginal FUD about Linux infringing on its patents (prompting Sun to remind it that real companies don't litigate, they innovate). Cinemas were lashing out at the idea of getting rid of movie release windows, CBS was learning why trying to build its own online video destination was a bad idea, and the latest update to AACS was cracked before it even hit the market. We also witnessed the birth of The Copyright Alliance at the hands of the RIAA, MPAA, Disney, Viacom and more.

Fifteen Years Ago

Sometimes — such as this week in 2002 — cracking CD protection was as easy as using a black marker or some electrical tape. Then again, other times the CD might lock up your iMac and force you to take it in for repairs. While the copyright world was discussing big, sweeping ideas like blanked licensing fees paid to ISPs and compulsory licenses for music downloads, the recently-announced Creative Commons was launching in earnest.

Also, you know that oft-mentioned fact about how everyone from Europe is descended from Charlemagne as a matter of mathematical inevitability? It was this week in 2002 that those numbers were first crunched.

One-Hundred And Fifteen Years Ago

Most of you are probably at least vaguely familiar with the Antikythera mechanism, an shockingly advanced astronomical calculator/analog computer from Ancient Greece. It was on May 17th, 1902 that the mechanism was discovered by an archaeologist examining the remnants of a ship, itself discovered on the sea floor two years earlier by sponge divers.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: May 7th - 13th

from the years-and-years dept

Five Years Ago

It was the previous week in 2012 that we learned the sad news of the death of the Beastie Boys' Adam Yauch (better known as MCA), and it was this week that the EFF called for an end to the war on sampling as a tribute to his legacy. Little did we know that, the very next day, Tuf America would sue the Beastie Boys over an unauthorized sample, which is some stunningly insensitive timing. And that wasn't the only copyright fuckup related to MCA's death — the co-creator of The Chappelle Show uploaded a previously unaired video of the Beastie Boys preforming for the show, only to have it taken down by a Viacom copyright claim.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, NBC was getting in on the Viacom/YouTube lawsuit with an amicus brief against the latter, while the government of Thailand was blocking the site entirely and considering its own lawsuit. Newspaper publishers, struggling to adapt to the web, were alternately scraping together data to portray their digital efforts as successful and blaming the internet for all their industry's woes. And "psychic" (read: mediocre magician) Uri Geller was abusing the DMCA and filing lawsuits in an attempt to censor a popular debunking of his little tricks by James Randi.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, we took a look at the absolute mess that was MusicNet, the attempt by major labels to offer a competitive digital music platform. The world was still for some reason debating whether video games are free speech, and a judge ruled that the DMCA was constitutional via an odd distinction regarding speech and software. Before mobile phones replaced the landline all but entirely, there was an earlier fear about them replacing people's second phone lines. And long, long before the west would see anything similar, Japan was adding wi-fi to 4000 McDonald's locations.

One-Hundred And Seventy-One Years Ago

America's oldest weekly newspaper that is still in publication is the Cambridge Chronical, and it was on May 7th, 1846 that the first issue was published, just a few days after Cambridge was incorporated as a city. Of course, like most old community newspapers, its recent history of sales and mergers has left it somewhat disconnected from its roots.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: April 30th - May 6th

from the not-so-special-301 dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012 the USTR, as it does every year, released its ridiculous Special 301 list of naughty countries, right around the same time that Chris Dodd was rewriting Hollywood history to thank IP laws for all of it. The UK was doing its part to stay off the list, apparently, with the High Court ordering The Pirate Bay to be blocked (and, of course, driving record traffic to the site). Techdirt friend Dan Bull — an artist whose single had just hit the charts with the help of piracy — shared his thoughts on the block with a guest post.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007 started the same way: with a silly Special 301 "watch list". The Pirate Bay was just beginning its growth as a political movement, and the author of a major UK copyright report was admitting that the evidence supports shortening copyright terms. The folks behind AACS, the new copyright protection scheme for DVDs, were learning all about the Streisand Effect in their attempt to suppress information about the technology — and also giving the Digg community a chance to demonstrate its control over the site. Meanwhile, the Google/Viacom lawsuit was moving slowly forward, and the UK's Premier League was getting in on the action.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, record labels were still excitedly announcing lacklustre digital music services, online radio stations were protesting onerous fees, and the new Eminem album was gearing up to be the largest copy-protected release to date. Deep linking reared its head again as a legal issue, online scams were going strong (and working as decent retirement plans for some, it seemed) and the crazy new idea of phones with WiFi was just on the horizon.

Eight-Hundred And Two Years Ago

Today we look back on the Magna Carta as a pivotal moment in the history of law (or just as an archetypal piece of general knowledge trivia), but at the time it was a stopgap solution in the midst of a political dispute between King John of England and some rebellious Barons. An important milestone in that dispute came on May 3rd, 1215 when the rebels officially declared against the King and issued their legal demands.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: April 16th - 22nd

from the as-I-recall dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, following widespread protests, ACTA was on the verge of death — but that hadn't stopped G8 countries from already preparing to replace it. Similarly, following the SOPA defeat, the usual copyright maximalist suspects were regrouping to come up with new tactics for fighting the public (and surely the revolving door between the MPAA and the federal government would help out on that front). Meanwhile, the lawmakers behind the new awful bill — CISPA — were downplaying the protests against it, even though the White House was also (meekly) opposed to the bill.

Also this week in 2012: Twitter unveiled its revolutionary patent agreement, and the Oracle/Google fight began heating up over the originally-secondary API copyright issues that would come to dominate the case.

Ten Years Ago

Maybe all those lawmakers should have read our post five years earlier in 2007, all about how politicians need to understand the internet before trying to regulate it. Of course, at the time, you had high new webcasting royalty rates from the RIAA, Sony's DRM on DVDs causing all sorts of problems, the Authors Guild calling writers who give away content 'scabs', and telco-funded think tanks insisting anyone who supports net neutrality is just a pirate. Some corporate competitions were getting nasty too, with Microsoft lobbing antitrust accusations over Google's purchase of DoubleClick and Ticketmaster suing StubHub over exclusivity.

Meanwhile, Mike's series on the economics of scarcity drew some poorly-argued ire from sources ranging from CNN's James Ledbetter to Dilbert creator Scott Adams (the latter of which turned into a longer back-and-forth).

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, lots of people were grappling with new questions and trends raised by technology. Parents were deciding whether or not to use internet filters for their kids while workplaces were getting into the idea of monitoring employees' instant messaging; texting was becoming a favorite tool of schoolyard bullies and, unsurprisingly, sexting was already on the rise (though still unnamed). Meanwhile, a new study was showing that the death of Napster did little to change the popularity of digital music, even as the recording industry continued to blame file sharing for all its woes (rather than, say, idiotic DRM "compromises" like a CD that lets you send temporary copies that "expire" to friends).

But every now and then in doing this rundown, I find one of those posts that sounded so innocent at the time and now evokes an instantaneous "oh if only you knew..." reaction — such as this brief post noting Nathan Myhrvold's "interesting idea" to start up an "invention factory." Can anyone recall how that turned out?

Forty Years Ago

Though the technology had already been in development and testing for some time, it was today on April 22nd that fiber-optic cable was first used to carry telephone traffic, reaching 6 Mbit/s speeds all the way back in 1977.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: April 9th - 15th

from the memory-lane dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, Congress (apparently having learned nothing from SOPA) was pushing forward with CISPA, the new cybersecurity bill. In its original form it was really, really bad — then a new draft was released that was slightly better but still full of problems. Nevertheless, the House Intelligence Committee launched a new Twitter account to misleadingly plug the bill, and it was even supported by companies like Facebook along with a promise not to abuse it — though we challenged them to go a step further and withdraw support until it was fixed to prevent anyone from abusing it.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, the lacklustre response to the Windows Vista launch was sending ripple effects through the computer hardware industry, though it appeared to be a bad time for consumer electronics in general. Though while some were chattering about Microsoft's demise, cooler heads pointed out that might be going a bit too far.

Also this week in 2007: Perfect 10 reared its head with a shotgun spray of lawsuits, a court pointed out the should-have-been-obvious fact that the First Amendment applies on MySpace as much as it does anywhere else, and Techdirt was nominated for a Webby award.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, plenty of folks were busy hacking the iPod to do new things and helping chart the future of mobile devices — right at the same time that thumb keyboards were becoming all the rage in the wake of the popularity of the Blackberry. Google was still in its pre-IPO days and trying to pin down a business model, and this was long before it came into conflict with the Authors Guild which, at the time, was moaning about Amazon for showing used book prices next to new book listings. But we took a look at the other side of that equation and saw how empowering a used book selling platform can be.

One-Hundred And Twenty-Three Years Ago

We've all heard of the early "nickelodeon" movie houses where five cents in a machine let you enjoy a brief kinetoscope of a butler falling over or whatever. It was on April 14, 1894 that this started with the first paid exhibition of motion pictures at Andrew M. Holland's phonograph store in New York City.

Filed Under: history, look back

This Week In Techdirt History: March 19th - 25th

from the archive-lane dept

Five Years Ago

This week in 2012, the public got a terrifying glimpse of the extent of the NSA's surveillance capabilities thanks to some excellent journalism, which put the agency on the defensive trying to downplay its powers. While this was going on, Senators Wyden and Udall were pressing the Obama administration to open up about its secret interpretation of the Patriot Act.

In the fallout of the Megaupload indictment, a restraining order on Kim Dotcom was rendered void by a procedural error, the MPAA was trying to get the site's data retained so it could sue the users (though it quickly tried to backtrack), and scammers were targeting Megaupload users by masquerading as copyright trolls sending settlement letters.

This was also the week of a major ruling in the patent world: the Supreme Court effectively rejected the concept of patenting medical diagnostics in Prometheus v. Mayo.

Ten Years Ago

This week in 2007, even as the RIAA was trying and failing to escape paying legal fees in a doomed lawsuit against an indebted mother of five, the agency was continuing to defend its practice of suing college kids and trying to get their schools to help — which irritated one university so much that it demanded the RIAA pay up for all the time that was wasted with onerous requests. Meanwhile, NBC Universal and News Corp. were making waves with their YouTube competitor, which you might notice has not become a lasting pillar of the internet, as plenty of people suspected at the time. But this was interesting since Viacom was just revving up in its lawsuit against the real YouTube, which Lawrence Lessig argued was made possible by the Grokster decision, and which was leading to some ironic situations with the company's own star content creators.

Fifteen Years Ago

This week in 2002, the world was being buried under a rising tide of spam, but at least society was beginning to accept that internet dating is normal. Not from work, of course, as offices were ramping up their efforts to block various internet activities in a misguided panic about productivity. Of course, some were over-ambitiously predicting that fully half of us would be working from home by 2007, in which case that would presumably cease to be a problem. It was a different time, when Stephen King was selling his novel in phone booths and the UK's Times Online was trying to charge web subscriptions to your phone bill (and, of course, trying to patent the technology). Most importantly, though, we saw an early victory for safe harbors when AOL was found not liable in a copyright lawsuit filed by Harlan Ellison over a Usenet posting.

Thirty-Eight Years Ago

If you care about US politics, you know it: it's the TV station you watch slightly less than you say you do and much less than you probably should, and this week was its birthday. That's right: on March 19th, 1979, C-SPAN was unveiled to the country, offering an unprecedented window into the House of Representatives. It opened with a speech by Al Gore, though at the time only 3.5-million homes were capable of receiving it. The Senate would not follow suit and allow itself to be televised for another seven years.

Filed Under: history, look back